Read the Book Traction by Gino Wickman and Beat Growing Pains

May 04, 2023 | 5 minute read

Here’s our take on another business book and whether we think the information inside can help you grow your business. Our book today is a popular one: Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. It gets brought up in networking conversations we have with other business leaders all the time. But will it meaningfully impact your business? Let’s go over it.

Here are some useful things you may not know about the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business.

Learn the 6 Components of a Successful Business and Apply Them to Grow

Here’s what Gino Wickman says are the 6 components of any successful business:

Vision: a goal or idea for the future of the business that everyone involved can get behind.
People: having the right people in the right positions to achieve the goal.
Data: quantifying progress through reliable and factual statistics to track progress toward the goal.
Issues: watching for and identifying obstacles on the road to the objective.
Process: developing a simple and repeatable process that can be adjusted if objectives aren’t reached.
Traction: achieving the vision by adhering to the components of People, Data, Issues, and Process with discipline and rigor.

Gino Wickman's Website is and Excellent Companion to the Book Traction

Not all books have great websites to go with them, or extra resources you can use to expand your knowledge of the concepts in the book. But Gino Wickman’s website is an exception.

On the website you can:

Download a free chapter of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business.
Download Business Management Tools, and
Get a visual version of his Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) model that depicts the 6 components of a successful business. For people who prefer learning visually, this is a great way to understand the components and apply them to your business.

What Lessons Are Worth Applying from Traction to Your Business

The lessons below are what we think are the main strengths of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. We get to see the internal workings of lots of companies as Tangible Words helps them to grow, and there are weaknesses that we see over and over again. These parts of Traction will help you address these common growing pains that almost every company experiences, and avoid or mitigate those problems.

Traction helps you articulate those intangible problems your business may be having. Reading each chapter will help you compare what you are currently doing against the company you want to become, which will make problems that didn’t even seem like problems stand out to you.
“Letting go of the vine.” Wickman uses this concept to prepare you for the necessity of growing pains in your business. Pain is a necessary aspect of change. It’s why we change in the first place. Once you accept that your company isn’t perfect out of the box, that you will face growing pains regularly, and that, in fact, this is a good thing, letting go of the vine will help you immensely.
Who do you see yourself being in the marketplace? Having a complete understanding of the role you want to fill is a key to success. Do you know where you want to be? Do your team members? Once your company is completely aligned on where it is and where you want it to be going, you’ll notice a lot more progress.

Listen to the Traction Episode of the Company Growth Podcast

Get more insights into the best parts of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business on the Traction episode of the Books to Help You Grow limited series of the Company Growth Podcast and learn lessons that could be transformative for your company.

To browse more episodes by topic, visit the Company Growth Podcast webpage.